Who Are the Yazidi 'Devil Worshipers' and Why Is ISIS Trying to Slaughter and Enslave This Ancient Minority? Part Two.

Like most Iraqis who suffered under Saddam Hussein, the Yazidis celebrated the overthrow of this hated dictator but, like the ancient Christian communities of northern Iraq, they soon became the target of fanatical Sunni jihadist groups such as Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) which rose up to fight the Americans. In 2007 AQI targeted the northern Iraqi Yazidi communities of Kathaniya and Jazeera with the deadliest suicide bombing in the world since 9/11. As many as 796 Yazidis were killed and another one thousand five hundred wounded in this massive bombing that involved a fuel tanker and three cars carrying two tons of explosives.But worse was yet to come. AQI morphed into ISIS and, in August 2014, launched a blitz on the Mount Sinjar region in northwestern Iraq. Mount Sinjar had been protected by the legendary Kurdish Peshmergas (literally "Those who Face Death," a famed fighting force), but these fighters fell back before the ISIS attack leaving this region to the mercy of the fanatical ISIS fighters. As it transpires, Mount Sinjar is the primary geographic focus of the Yazidis who consider it to be a holy mountain (they believe that this mountain, which rises spectacularly out of the flat desert, is the spot where Noah's ark first touched ground after the flood and have seven temples there with eternal flames). As the ISIS fighters stormed the town of Sinjar, which lies at the foot of the mountain of the same name, they killed as many as 5,000 Yazidis in an act that the U.N. labeled "genocide." One report of this massacre stated that Yazidis were being shot dead and dumped in mass graves and herded into temples that were then blown up.

The jihadists also captured hundreds of Yazidi women as sabiya (Quran-legitimized sex slaves) and sold them like chattel in markets to ISIS fighters. These women, many of them young girls, were systematically raped and abused by their ISIS masters and most still remain living in misery as sex slaves for fanatics who legitimize their abuse by labeling them "idolaters" and "infidels" (their plight did not garner as much attention as the kidnapping of schoolgirls by Boko Haram jihadi terrorists in Nigeria). Older women who were not deemed worthy to be sabiya were dragged away and systematically murdered en masse in cold blood. As many as 50,000 panic-stricken Yazidis fled to Mount Sinjar's bleak, inaccessible heights to escape the ISIS slaughterers. To prevent their genocide, President Obama launched a bombing campaign that halted ISIS's advance and an airlift that provided food and water to the starving Yazidi refugees trapped on the mountain. Kurdish Peshmergas later broke through ISIS lines creating a corridor allowing most, but not all, of the refugees on Mount Sinjar to escape. But by then it was too late, the heart of the Yazidi population and culture had been obliterated and many distinctive Yazidi shrines, with their conical, fluted towers, were destroyed. Fortunately, in December 2015, Kurdish forces backed up by the U.S. Air Force, defeated the ISIS force occupying the town of Sinjar and some of this scattered community are tentatively returning home. But most have been scattered far and wide from their sacred lands and many have joined in the movement of refugees to Europe. The Yazidis' exile from the ancient shrines of their people threatens to dilute their identity as a distinct people.This was the background for our visit to the holy shrine of Lailish located to the east of Mount Sinjar safely behind Kurdish Peshmerga lines in northwestern Kurdistan.A Visit to Yazidi Shrine at Lailish.